“Really?” Eric asked. “When were you in the subway?”
“Sometimes I took the Lexington line downtown, but I heard it from this homeless guy I met in the park. I guess he could tell by the way I said hi that I lived on the street before.
He said that my face an’ hands didn’t go wit’ the clothes I was wearin’. He told me that if you go down on the subway rails under Grand Central that you’d find a whole village where homeless people lived. They got everything down there, even electricity.”
“That sounds like a tall tale to me,” Minas Nolan said in his certain tone.
“Could be though,” Thomas said. And then he told Minas about his alley valley and the apartment-building clubhouse he shared with Pedro.
“It’s like when you look at someplace and say that there’s not nuthin’ there,” Thomas concluded. “But when you look closer you see animals an’ birds an’ things. I met a woman who told me that there’s all kindsa millions and millions’a animals too small to be seen walkin’ all ovah everywhere all 2 8 2
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the time. Her daddy was a scientist, but she was crazy an’ had to live in the street.”
“That’s terrible,” Minas said.
“Yeah,” Thomas replied. “But nobody know it.”
E ri c and M ona and Thomas and Minas Nolan all sat in the living room drinking a citrus punch that Ahn had made.
Eric explained everything he’d learned from Constance Baker without talking about the way things ended with her. Mona sat on Thomas’s lap, rubbing her hands over his fingers.
“Your fingers like sandpaper, Uncle Tommy.”
“I used to spend all my time out in a park that I had.”
“You had your own park?” The girl was astonished.
“Yeah. But it was real dirty because people were always throwin’ trash in it. That’s why I got such rough hands —
throwin’ all the trash away all the time.”
“Oh.”
Raela and her brother, Michael, came over in the afternoon. Michael was accompanied by a scarred woman named Doris. Doris wore an orange dress and had one light- and one dark-blue eye. Raela was thinner than before but just as beautiful as Thomas had remembered. After a while Eric and his friends and daughter decided to go down to the beach.
“You wanna come, Tommy?” Eric asked.
“Not today. I just wanna stay around here.”
Thomas was thinking that he could go up to his mother’s old room and sink to his knees. It had been a long time since he’d been home.
But Dr. Nolan wanted to talk awhile longer. Thomas didn’t mind. It had been many years since he was alone with 2 8 3
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his mother’s lover. When he was traveling the streets of L.A.
he often thought of the talks he’d had with the doctor.
“I’m very sorry about the things that have happened,”
Minas said when they were alone.
“It’s not your fault,” Thomas replied. “The law took me away. It took me from you, then it took me from my real father, and then it put me in jail. I don’t really like the law all that much. It’s like no matter what I do there’s some law to tell me I’m wrong.”
“When you put it like that,” Minas said, “it doesn’t seem fair. You’d think that the law would protect young people.”
“But it don’t, doesn’t,” Thomas said, correcting his street language with the way he’d learned to speak in Minas’s house years before. “All the kids I knew were in trouble or makin’
trouble. And when I was livin’ on the street, the cops was the last people you wanted to see.”
“How did you manage to survive living like that?” Minas asked.
Thomas could see by the way the doctor winced that he was afraid of the answer.
“It was pretty much always the same,” Thomas said. “You needed food and shelter mostly, and money to buy stuff like toothpaste or Band-Aids. You’d stay in one place as long as you could, but you had other places in mind in case the cops or somebody moved you out. But once you had what you needed, then you could read a book or talk to somebody or think. I liked to think.”
“What would you think about?” Minas asked.
“You an’ Ahn an’ Eric,” Thomas said, “and my mother. I used to have a blank book and I’d write in that. I wrote mostly about nice things that people did for me and sometimes about why people was so mean. One man once told me 2 8 4
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that he thought that people were mean to the homeless because we were so poor. He said that people hate poor people in America . . . Oh, oh, yeah.”
“What?” Minas asked.
